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A History of Payment Methods

23 Aug 2017

I came across this “history of payments” infographic, that I think is worth a few minutes of your time:

As I see it, this particular evolution of money (from paper money to virtual money) is something that we often miss today. Perhaps we assume that a bank balance is just a convenient way of holding cash notes (or something like that) – but the reality is that there is not enough physical cash to ever cash out of the banking system completely.

And (I guess) Bitcoin and the other thousands of cryptocurrencies are a real world response to the fact that it was almost impossible to remove yourself from the global banking system.